Earlier this year VMware and Okta announced a partnership to integrate each others products to unify the user context with the device context provided by Okta and VMware Workspace ONE. At VMworld 2018 in Barcelona I sat the session regarding the use of their products to drive a zero trust approach but to enable the users with passwordless experience.

One of my focuses at VMworld 2018 in Barcelona was to look further into IoT technologies and their impact on business and IT infrastructure as well as getting a better understanding of both VMware Pulse and VMware Edge compute solutions.

See my doodle below with some of my notes from the sessions I attended.

The second general session at VMworld 2018 in Barcelona focused on great conversations with VMware customers who have been using VMware technologies to meet their business needs. Most importantly their was an inspiring theme of how technology can and should be used for good. Martha Lane Fox founder of LastMinute.com closed the general session with the inspirational story of her life founding lastminute.com at 25 during the dot com boom before being involved in a life changing crash that involved her spending 2 years in hospital. Martha now dedicates her time to technology projects where she can drive change for good.

The digital workspace keynote was one of my favourite sessions of VMworld 2018, Shawn Bass (VMware EUC CTO) and team demonstrated their modern management approach across heterogeneous devices as well as demonstrating the user focused experiences of mobile flow and the new Workspace ONE intelligent hub. Finally with Workspace ONE intelligence IT are able to be empowered with the intelligent information around the applications and devices to deliver amazing user focused support.

This morning I attending an update from Ivanti covering their product portfolio and strategy. Ivanti have a large portfolio of products based upon a number of acquisitions of companies such as Heat Software, AppSense, Lumension, LANDesk and many more. Ivanti other solutions are EUC / IT Operations, Secure Management and Operational Security. For me as ever an important aspect of the Ivanti portfolio is the ability to combat common security issues within organisations including, patching, user rights management, application whitelisting and more. Also following the RES Software accusation automation is an element of their portfolio that I am looking forward to understanding much better.

Only half of the day two general session was live streamed, but above is my doodle covering what was featured. Sanjay Poonen VMware COO spoke about the engines that fuel VMware being innovation and the customer, VMware are the only company in NPS to be listed in the top 5 for customer satisfaction five years running. He also spoke about the growth of VMware and how every customer that has deployed VMware technologies has been able in turn been able to reduce costs, reduce complexity and reduce carbon. There were a number of customer references live on stage talking about how they are innovating with VMware tecnologies with a strong focus on the SDDC, VMware Cloud, PKS and NSX.

As ever the first day keynote at VMworld was packed with thought leadership, announcements and demonstrations. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger took to the stage to discuss the super powers of technology, these were cloud, mobile, AI / ML and Edge / IOT. VMware have been slowly enhancing their long term vision of any device, any app, any cloud with intrinsic security and this years keynote further demonstrated that.

We saw demonstrations and announcements in all areas with the release of vSphere 6.7 update 1 featuring updates for vSAN and more. We saw further demonstration of VMware's close relationship with AWS with AWS RDS (Relational Database Services) being made available on premises via vSphere in coming months. Close integration with vSphere, NSX and Kurbenetes with vSphere PKS and IoT edge infrastructures being treated as a first class citizenship bringing the IT to IoT with a demonstration of vSphere on ARM allowing for true enterprise class features such as FT, vMotion and HA being made available at the edge.

Ed Morgan and Mark Shaw of Rubrik presented at the recent Define Tomorrow Huddle in Bristol. They introduced us to the Rubrik platform including use cases and more. Check out the full presentation, blog posts and more over at Define Tomorrow >> https://www.definetomorrow.co.uk/past-huddles/2018/4/24/rubrik-bitdefender-zerto-20th-may-2018

Steve Blow of Zerto gave a brilliant presentation at our first Define Tomorrow Huddle in April 2018. Steve covered and overview of Zerto including use cases and architecture. Check out the full presentation and more over at Define Tomorrow >> https://www.definetomorrow.co.uk/past-huddles/2018/4/24/rubrik-bitdefender-zerto-20th-may-2018

We recently held out first Define Tomorrow Huddle at Bristol Aerospace in the shadow of the concorde. Liam Puleo of Bitdefender presented about the Bitdefender architecture and how it can help businesses protect their computers and servers from cyber attack.

Think Productive and Evernote held an event at Bristol University focusing on productivity and attention management. The two speakers were Graham Allcott of Think Productive and author of the Productivity Ninja book and Dr Beat Bühlmann of Evernote.

Today’s South West UK VMUG was sponsored by HPE and StorMagic. HPE spoke to the VMUG audience about Infosight their Storage analytics platform included today within their Nimble storage solutions but coming to other HPE product lines in the future.

StorMagic was one of my favorite presentations they spoken about their virtual storage platform that is designed for small, RoBo and IoT use cases. Their platform is designed to deliver high levels of availability with options for SSD caching and encryption for small virtual environments.

Here is the doodle.

Alongside the sponsors we also had presentations from VMware’s Adam Boyle on vSphere and vSAN 6.7, VMware’s Lukas Winn and VMUG Leader Jeremy Bowman on GDPR / ISO 27001